I’m skeptical that I’m going to make it to SPG Gold again this year (10 stays), so I started trying to game the system. I went to NYC for 2 days for work and hotel hopped – stayed at 2 different hotels during the trip. Then we took a cross-border shopping trip to upstate New York the following weekend and I stayed at another SPG hotel. That’s 3 different SPG hotels in one week! Now I’m halfway to gold (and it’s about halfway through the year so I’m not really ahead).

I was finally able to release an update (v2) of A Healthier Commute to Google Play. This was a substantial release as the app actually passively learns your commutes and plays them back in the UI. I was actually done the majority of the code in April, but spent May tweaking various parameters of the algorithm to make it work better. It’s still not perfect but it’s getting better. I’m not sure how much better (certainly not perfect) I can make it though; I’m sure someone like Google could implement it better, but I’m stuck with the tools that I have access to.

Last May, we spent a lot of time outdoors going to parks and whatnot with Apollo. I remember this because I have a lot of photos with Apollo outside. We didn’t do as much this year. We tried to do it a bit earlier in April, but it was too cold, and we just didn’t make it out as often over the weekends in May.

I finished up my Pocket queue this month – mostly because I had a bunch of short articles and was travelling. Now I’m trying to restock, but I may have to resort to reading books on my eReader instead!